


child, 39 (hold me tight, fear me not)

by theseourbodies



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Cuddling & Snuggling, Gen, OT4, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, super platonic ot4 because one of them is a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-21 23:55:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13751859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseourbodies/pseuds/theseourbodies
Summary: “Well, the most I can tell you is the obvious—this is in fact Colonel Sheppard, but whether his wee self has been borrowed from the past, or—Lord, forbid—from another reality, or if he’s just been physically, ah,de-agedis all speculation at this point.”John gets whammied. Things fall apart a little, but come together again.





	child, 39 (hold me tight, fear me not)

The conference room doors are sealed shut, but Teyla gains access easily; she is expected.

Inside, Teyla looks immediately, instinctively to Ronon, who is both the only member of her team present and the only one standing. To her shock, he is holding a small child tightly in his arms, incredibly young and dressed in what looks like someone’s uniform shirt, belted at the waist with paracord. It takes barely a moment before the little child—a boy, she notices—to notice her entrance, and immediately says _her name_. 

“Teyla!” He reaches for her from his perch in Ronon’s arms, both arms thrown out and utterly trusting her to do exactly what she does: catch him up in her arms and pull him close. The dissonance of who this must be wages war against her best understanding of the world; even his underdeveloped voice, high and clear, says her name the same way. It is all care and affection, and she is so overwhelmed she can only hold him and observe.

The boy is average sized for his age, she thinks, thick dark hair and bright, light eyes. He hugs her tightly with the ease of long familiarity, his short arms wrapped around her neck. She clutches him close instinctively, searching out Ronon’s face for confirmation he gives with a nod. “John?” she asks quietly into the mess of the little boy’s hair and he leans back from her a little to grin crookedly. 

“’Course,” he says easily, pleased for no reason that she can discern other than that she is here. It is a small, simple joy, and this too is familiar. It is rare to see when he is himself, but she’s glimpsed the same simple happiness when he flies. There is no doubt, now. This is indeed her friend, John Sheppard. 

“What has happened,” Teyla whispers, to herself and to the boy in her arms.   
“That’s just what I’d like to know,” Elizabeth answers, and Teyla startles; she had not seen Elizabeth sitting at the conference table. Now she observes the room more closely: she and Ronon are still the only one’s standing, John’s improbably diminished body held close in her arms, and Ronon tickling his sides idly; Elizabeth sits at the table nearest to the small cluster of AR-1, her expression still in the way that Teyla knows means she is very, very angry; and across from her three members of the expedition Teyla only recognizes by face, all of them in science blues and with expressions that are shifting wildly, even as she watches. Almost to a man they are looking her way; she cannot imagine what they are waiting for. She would be more inclined to offer comfort if her adult team leader and friend were not currently giggling at Ronon and small enough for her to carry, and if it were not so obvious that they had had some hand in it. 

The man in the center has the good grace to look away, ashamed; the others just look troubled. 

“We’re just waiting on Dr. McKay and Dr. Beckett,” Elizabeth says calmly—and Carson indeed does step through the door before she finishes speaking. 

“Alright, alright, what’s—oh. Oh, dear,” Carson stumbles to a stop, looking between the members of AR-1 and Elizabeth’s face rapidly. 

“I wasn’t quite sure how to explain when I called for you, Carson, I apologize,” Elizabeth says, rising gracefully. For the first time since Teyla realized she was there, her expression loses all stiffness—she smiles at John and asks gently, “John, do you remember Carson?” 

Even as a child John is still very much Elizabeth’s, Teyla sees immediately and with great relief. He turns toward her instinctively, even as he shies away from Carson cautiously. He nods shyly, face half tucked into Teyla’s hair. 

“’Lo, Carson.” 

“That’s… that’s quite alright, Elizabeth, I can’t say I’d have entirely believed you without seeing him for myself. Hello laddie,” Carson says to John warmly. “Do you mind if I give you a little look see? Just to make sure you’re in as fine a form as you look. Maybe I’ll have Ronon hold you, so we don’t wear Teyla out, hmm?”

“Come here, squirt,” Ronon rumbles, and Teyla reluctantly lets John go when he reaches eagerly for Ronon. Without him to hold, however, she can join Elizabeth at the table; they need to get to the bottom of this, clearly. 

“Where’s Roddy?” John asks behind her, and Teyla looks back to see him looking around earnestly while Carson examines him and quietly makes observations out loud—most likely to Dr. Biro over their radios, Teyla realizes. 

“He’ll be here soon, John,” Elizabeth answers gently without condescension—and again, almost as if summoned just by her speaking his name, Rodney storms into the conference room, face already furious. Like Teyla did, he looks immediately to the team, Teyla and then Ronon, and then his face goes slack with disbelief when he catches sight of John. 

“What… John?” He steps forward quickly, but Teyla has noticed John going still in Ronon’s arms, hiding his face against Ronon’s neck. Rodney reaches for him, and to Teyla’s shock John flinches; Rodney snatches his hand back as if he’s been burned. He looks horrified, maybe ashamed—Teyla feels her own heart break for him, but even as she watches he balls his hand into a fist and sharpens his emotion at the rejection into a weapon as he whips around to face Elizabeth and the scientists. 

Teyla shakes off her dumb silence and hurries to Ronon’s side. “John, what—” she starts, but John only shakes his head into Ronon’s shoulder.

Behind her, Rodney hisses, “What the _hell_ happened, Ewing?” 

The small part of Teyla that is not frantically worried about John’s abrupt swing in mood is hotly glad that Rodney is here. No one expects comfort from him—he and Elizabeth will find out exactly how John came to be in this state. She pets at John’s back and coos nonsense sounds to try and calm his sudden anxiety, but she only feels him tremble as behind her Rodney and Elizabeth grow louder and more insistent. 

“I don’t care about what protocols you did or didn’t follow, you lackwit, I want to know just what the _hell_ —”

“McKay!” Ronon interrupts sharply, passing John to Teyla gently. She notes unhappily that John has started to cry, almost silently. 

“ _What_.”

“Calm down, you’re freaking him out.”

Teyla exchanges a baffled look with Elizabeth, who is frowning sharply. When he looks back, Rodney looks miserable and guilty for a split second before he recovers himself and turns away from them.

“Then get him out of here,” he says coolly. “Take him down to the medical ward, Carson.”

“McKay—”

“Just go! I need to figure out what the hell’s even happened and if I can’t do that while he’s here then get him out!” 

Against her shoulder John hiccups on a thin sob, and it’s Rodney’s turn to flinch. Teyla sees it in his shoulders even with his back to them. 

“Please just go,” he finishes, sounding dull—sounding defeated. Teyla badly wants to reach for him; she sees in Ronon’s disturbed expression that he would like to, too, but John is now crying in earnest, still quiet but quite steady. Elizabeth runs a worried hand back through John’s hair before they go, Carson leading the way with worry projecting from his entire body. 

“Try to figure out what’s caused this, Teyla,” Elizabeth asks quietly, nodding gently towards John, before she turns away to rejoin Rodney at the table. Ronon, Teyla, and Carson are a corridor away before the shouting from the conference room is entirely inaudible. 

||

John cries himself out by the time they reach the medical ward. Ronon’s holding him once again and to Teyla’s distant delight he is singing to the boy in a low cracking voice while John sniffs tiredly and lolls his head against Ronon’s shoulder. Carson whisks them into one of the separate, closed rooms without any of his staff or the few patients in the ward being the wiser. He settles all three of them with determined cheerfulness before he leaves again, “Just for a moment, and I’ll be right back with some equipment.” 

Ronon doesn’t bother putting John down; he settles, boy and all, onto the bed with Teyla perched beside them, petting at John’s back. He pulls back from Ronon to look at her with tired eyes in a miserable face. 

“I’m sorry, Teyla,” he says softly. 

She smiles at him, but even she can tell it is a sad effort. “I am perhaps not the one you need to be saying sorry to, John,” she says quietly and John’s face crumples. 

“I’m _sorry_.”

“Can you tell me why you were upset, John?” 

John presses his lips together and looks away, and Teyla is once again struck by the familiar adult expression on this child’s face. 

Ronon bounces John gently. “Buddy?” he prompts when John remains silent. 

“He’s mad at me, Roddy’s mad,” John whispers, with the air of someone who is revealing a great secret at great personal cost. 

Teyla and Ronon exchange a look, the memory of Rodney yelling, audible from a corridor away, still fresh for them both. “I….do not believe he was angry at you John.” And why just Rodney, and not Elizabeth, who had also been angry?

“He tells me, _all the time_ , don’t touch, but I did and I’m sorry, but I did and now he’s mad and I’m so sorry, Teyla, I’m so--!” 

It comes out of John in a rush, and his voice cracks on another dry sob; he stops, too visibly overwhelmed to speak. Teyla resists to urge to lean back and look at him properly; removing comforting touch as an unintentional punishment had been a bad habit of her father’s, one that as she grew she had vowed never to develop with any child, her own or otherwise. She keeps her hand gentle on John’s back even as she hears her voice become firm. 

“What did you touch John?” 

“I didn’t _mean to_. Those guys dropped it and I caught it and now Roddy is _so mad_ but I’m so sorry. I am!” John says fervently, his eyes large and bright and earnest, and Teyla is not strong enough to resist that expression in the grown man, let alone the child.

“Oh, John, I truly do not believe that Rodney was angry with you.” Rodney rarely truly was, even when John, as an adult, had done things far worse than instinctively catching a falling object, artifact or no. 

“Yeah, you know McKay—Rodney. All bark, no bite,” Ronon says, playfully biting at the air in front of John’s face until the boy laughs wetly and dissolves into playful shrieking as he dodges Ronon’s teeth. He scrambles over the bed to curl up behind Teyla, who is unable to hide her own smile. 

“Unlike you, clearly,” she tells Ronon archly as she playfully protects a giggling John. Carson walks in on them all like this, all tears forgotten, and watches with great indulgence as Ronon and Teyla rearrange themselves and their charge appropriately. 

“I’m glad you’ve perked up, laddie, I’ve just got some little tests to run, and then I think you’d better go and see Elizabeth again, and—” he hesitates.

“And Rodney,” Teyla says firmly, waiting for John’s big nods of agreement. 

“An’ Roddy,” John agrees with a serious child’s firm chin and set mouth— again so like the adult’s expression that she bites her lip against a smile.

||

The tests are short and reveal what a baffled Carson tells them earnestly once they conclude. “Well, the most I can tell you is the obvious—this is in fact Colonel Sheppard, but whether his wee self has been borrowed from the past, or—Lord, forbid—from another reality, or if he’s just been physically, ah, _de-aged_ is all speculation at this point. I’ll have to know what it is that’s caused this before I proceed.” 

Since it had quickly become clear that John had only the barest memory of whatever it was that he had caught and accidentally activated, the other members of the team he had been with are their only hope for getting a better description. John opts to walk on their way back to the conference room, a hand in one each of Teyla’s and Ronon’s so that he can skip and swing between them when the mood takes him—which it does less and less as they get closer and closer to the sealed conference room and the stern guards keeping watch outside it it. Both of those guards pointedly don’t stare at their diminutive commander but it Teyla suspects it would take a man of stone to not crack at John’s shy greetings to them both. 

“Hello Mal, hello Jorge.” 

Mal Montgomery, who keeps a photo book of her combined thirteen nieces and nephews in her nightstand, gives him a tiny smile and wave; Jorge Esposito cannot suppress his own smile and murmurs, “Hey, buddy.” 

John smiles at them both, but it doesn’t last. With the tragic air of man approaching his doom, John grips Teyla and Ronon’s hands very tightly and walks with them up the steps to the conference room. 

The yelling has stopped but the discussion has gotten no less intense in the time that they have been gone. One of the involved scientists, a tall, skeletal man with wire-rimmed glasses stammers to a halt when the door opens to admit the three of them—he had been the man who had looked ashamed earlier. The man to his left, with dark, limp hair had his face pressed into his palms; the remaining member of the team looked mutually mutinous and terrified. He was the youngest of the lot of them, and had his hands balled into fists on the table in front of him. 

“Not, not returned to normal, then,” the skeletal man stammers miserably. 

“Obviously not, Dr. Harman,” Elizabeth says dryly before turning towards John in her seat with a smile. “Hello, John. How are you?”

John only smiles at her, looking between her and Rodney anxiously; after his instinctive turn towards them when they had entered, Rodney had returned to staring resolutely at the panel of men before him. Teyla can only see a quarter of his face from their position: the tight set of his jaw, his stubbornly averted eyes. She wishes he would look at them, but she understands why he cannot. 

Heart in her throat, Teyla puts gentle hands on John’s shoulders. “Rodney, may we speak to you?” 

Rodney bows his head briefly and then nods. He looks back to the men before him and says icily, “You’re all confined to quarters until we can figure this mess out. Ewing, submit that device directly to Dr. Zalenka in the thermo-nuclear lab and for god’s sake don’t drop it this time.” 

The youngest man clenches his jaw shut, eyes hot with embarrassment and badly concealed anger. 

“Consider this a disciplinary act of permanent record, gentlemen,” Elizabeth states in her terrible, neutral voice. “After Dr. Ewing surrenders this device to Dr. Zalenka’s custody, your credentials will be officially withdrawn. I wouldn’t violate your confinement, under any but emergency circumstances. Do you understand.” It fails to be a question, but all three men acknowledge Elizabeth with varying degrees of civility. “Good. Captains Montgomery and Esposito will escort you.” 

They file out without fanfare into the tender mercies of Montgomery and Esposito, who are cool eyed soldiers once again. 

“I’ll need a report on this device sent to Carson and myself as soon as possible, Rodney,” Elizabeth says, sounding exhausted. 

“Radek already knows to expect it, he’ll get started as soon as it’s in hand. I’ll join him… well, I’ll be there shortly.” 

“I trust you both, don’t worry. Just get it figured out.”

Rodney bows his head in acknowledgement and levers himself out of his seat; he hangs back against the table as Elizabeth rises out of her own seat slowly and moves towards Teyla, Ronon, and John. Despite the way that this meeting has obviously worn on she and Rodney both, her smile for John is genuine and wide. She leans down to run her hand back through his hair again. “Be good, John, we’ll get this figured out,” she whispers, and pulls him closer to kiss the top of his head as he wraps his arms around her neck tightly. “I’ll see you soon,” she says when they separate; with a quiet “Thank you both,” and a tired smile for Ronon and Teyla, she leaves AR-1 to their own devices.

Ronon crosses the divide first, taking up a position next to Rodney casually. Rodney looks at him with naked relief that Teyla must look away from to maintain her own composure from her position standing immediately behind John, who has started fidgeting nervously. 

Rodney clears his throat in the growing silence. “Well?” he asks. His voice doesn’t tremble but Teyla can hear how nervous he is. 

She’s about to prompt John gently when the boy suddenly draws in a sharp breath and blurts, “Please don’t be mad!” and bursts into tears. 

Ronon and Rodney both jolt forward in alarm, but Ronon holds himself back so that it’s Rodney who gets to John first, kneeling instinctively to put them on a level. He’s very close to John, but he doesn’t try to touch him again, to Teyla’s dismay; unfortunately, negative stimulus is one of Rodney McKay’s swiftest teachers. 

“John?” Rodney asks carefully, stumbling a little over the name.

“Please— _Please_ don’t be mad at me!” John gets out around heaving, shaking breaths. His small hands are clenched in the fabric of the shirt he’s wearing, and Teyla can see that he is trembling. 

“Why would I be mad at _you_?” Rodney asks, visibly perplexed and obviously upset by this turn of events. Teyla bites her tongue against the explanation she wants to give, to help give him clarity; Rodney won’t believe his reasons unless the explanation comes from John. Conversely, John will find no peace unless he hears the truth from Rodney. 

“You tell me all the time I need, need to not touch, but I did, and it wasn’t on purpose, it wasn’t on purpose, I’m _sorry_ , please don’t be mad!” 

Rodney’s eyebrows shoot up. “Oh. Oh, you think-- I’m not angry at _you_!” Rodney says quickly, too loud. Then, quieter, “I’m not angry at you at all.”

John stares at him, eyes wide as he takes gasping stuttering breaths. He asks tremulously, “What?” 

Rodney slumps toward John—still not touching him, or reaching for him, Teyla notes with despair—and Teyla sees Ronon move in closer to Rodney’s back even as she herself nudges John gently forward. Comfort or protection: she doesn’t know which instinct it is that drives them, but she appreciates it all the same. 

“Sometimes… well, sometimes I find that my emotions don’t exactly present themselves in their purest forms. Though that can be said for a lot of people so I—”

“Mckay,” Ronon interrupts again, though his voice is much softer than earlier. Rodney turns to look at him desperately. “Small words. Make it easy,” Ronon tells him and Rodney deflates. 

“Right, right….” He looks back at John and takes a deep breath. “I wasn’t angry, not at you. Sometimes, when things happen…. I get scared. Very scared. I don’t deal well with unknowns—with things I don’t have answers for. Do you understand? Something happened to you and I don’t know what. I don’t know how to fix it. And that does make me angry, but not at you, ok? Never—never at you.” Rodney rubs his fingertips together anxiously, a thinking gesture that Teyla knows well. “I don’t know what else to—Oomph!” 

There is, apparently, nothing else to be said. John breaks from his position pressed to Teyla’s shins and throws his arms around Rodney’s neck. Rodney, for his part, shoots Teyla one frantic look before instinct takes over and he wraps both arms around John’s body and lifts him with a grunt of effort. Looking mildly embarrassed and close to tears himself, Rodney rocks John gently and says lowly, “I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry I yelled. I’m sorry I scared you, but in my defense, you scared _me_ —” and “Oh, please don’t cry, is this good crying or bad crying?” as John sobs and laughs into his shoulder. Rodney looks at Ronon and Teyla anxiously, and says, “Well? Good?” as if there was any way that this outcome was not the best possible. Teyla smiles brightly and puts her head down on the shoulder John is occupying, to rub John’s back and nuzzle his cheek until he starts giggling in earnest. 

Ronon laughs and says “Yeah, McKay, good,” approvingly before he wraps the whole knot of them up in a hug only he is capable of. 

Rodney makes noises about going to see the device with Radek after a moment, but it is half-hearted at best. Teyla wraps an arm around his waist and makes non-comital sounds until Rodney finally gives in. 

It’s a long time until they disentangle, and their friend is still not as he should be; but for now, Teyla thinks that they deserve these long moments of peace and companionship; she settles in against the bodies of her teammates, content.

**Author's Note:**

> If you have any suggestions for the further adventures of wee!John, drop me a line in the comments or on tumblr
> 
> [theseourbodies.tumblr.com](https://theseourbodies.tumblr.com/)


End file.
